ASUS ROG STRIX B450-I Gaming AM4 Motherboard Review: Page 4 of 9

A Closer Look

ASUS manages to cram a TON of features into a diminutive ITX form factor.

Given the feature list, it’s no surprise the bottom of the board is quite busy. There are a ton of components back here, but most importantly is a 2nd M.2 drive slot.

The rear I/O area is somewhat sparse given how much I/O is on the board itself. You get six USB ports, four USB 3.1 gen 1 and two USB 3.1 gen 2. You also get gigabit ethernet, 802.11 AC 2x2 WiFi, Lighted analog audio jacks which was also on the X470 version of this board, and a single HDMI 2.0b which is only available when using AMD Ryzen processors equipped with VEGA graphics.

The top corner has the 8-pin EPS connection to feed power to the AM4 socket, three 4-pin fan headers, and a pair of RGB headers that covers both analog and digital RGB setups.

The front edge is also jam-packed with connectors. Besides the main 24-pin power, you get a pair of SATA ports, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 headers and the front panel I/O connections. It’s also easy to miss, but you get 4 LED’s near the 24-pin that indicate POST steps to help you quickly diagnose which sub-system is causing issues such as VGA or memory. Two more SATA ports sit just on the other side of the DIMM slots.

This is actually a pretty unique solution even though ASUS has used daughter boards on its ITX offerings before.

Even though the M.2 cover doesn’t light up like its X470 sibling, it pops loose quite easily and includes a thermal pad to help keep your drive cool.

Along the bottom of the front edge is a dozen RGB LED’s.

These LED’s create a nice indirect splash across your motherboard tray and of course, they are fully ASUS Aura controllable.